Run Wild (Escape with a Scoundrel) - By Shelly Thacker Page 0,58

was ten and he turned in the daylight, the bright, piercing daylight of Execution Dock, and saw his father on the scaffold, saw his tall, proud father standing there helpless with his hands behind his back and the rope around his neck.

“Father!” he shouted in horror, struggling against the hands that held him, against the men in their blue-and-white uniforms who had taken him from his father’s ship and brought him here. He fought with all his strength but they would not let him go.

Helplessly, he watched as they forced his father up onto a stool—the navy officers he had worked for, the friends he had fought beside in the war against Spain. Why had they betrayed him? Why why why?

One of them tightened the rope around his father’s throat. Nicholas called out to him, his hoarse, small voice lost in the growing roar of the crowd.

His father was calling back to him, something important, but Nicholas couldn’t hear and he began crying and looked away but one of the men who held him grabbed his chin and forced his head up, forced him to watch.

“Remember this, lad. Remember English justice. This is how the admiralty deals with pirates.”

And then all he could hear was screaming, his own voice screaming no no no his father wasn’t a pirate. James Brogan was a privateer, fighting for the king, a good man, an honorable man.

And he was all Nicholas had in the world. All they had was each other.

And then Captain Eldridge, who was his father’s best friend, very best friend, knocked the stool from beneath his feet.

And his father was kicking, struggling.

Dying.

And they forced Nicholas to watch until he stopped moving.

Until James Brogan’s struggles grew weaker and weaker and finally ended.

As the crowd cheered.

Nicholas went limp, sobbing brokenly, collapsing in the navy officers’ grasp, his body wracked by heaving, pitiful sobs that were larger than he was.

And they let go of him and he fell to the cobbles and lay there, weeping.

And he was alone.

Talons of fire clawed at him. Pain that burned and consumed him until he was ash until he was nothing and still he hurt. Oh God let the hurt end let it end he could not bear any more he was nothing but agony and fire and there was no one to hear him no one to help him...

Lieutenant Wakefield stood over him, smiling, brandishing the glowing iron rod in his hand.

“Be grateful, boy.” He spat a mouthful of tobacco onto the deck. “You’re to be spared.”

Nicholas did not reply, did not fight. Not because he was brave, but because he was too terrified to make even a sound. He did not understand what was happening, what ship this was or why they had brought him here. They had stripped him to the waist. One burly sailor held his arms pinned to the deck, another his legs.

And the one named Wakefield towered over him. “Welcome aboard the Molloch.”

He pressed the white-hot metal against Nicholas’s chest, pressed it down hard.

Nicholas screamed, a high-pitched scream like a bo’sun’s whistle. The sky went spinning, turned black as he felt and heard the sizzle, smelled the acrid scent of his own flesh burning, felt the branding iron bite deeply into him.

He begged them to stop, but his cries and his tears made the navy men laugh.

And when they were done they picked him up and threw him into the hold.

Into a place beyond imagining, a place of darkness and ovenlike heat and the stench of too many bodies packed too closely together. And he cried and he hurt and he prayed, prayed for God to help him. For weeks.

Then he stopped.

Because God had abandoned him. The loving God his mother had told him about would not have done this to him. He came to realize that in this world, there were only devils and hell. Devils in blue uniforms, hell without end.

And he would never cry again.

Because he hated them all hated them all hated them all...

He opened his eyes and saw only darkness, saw that the flames had died down but he could still feel them. Pain heat fire stop but God had abandoned him and he was alone and it would not end would never end never end never...

“Seventy-nine... eighty...”

The lash fell rhythmically, slicing into his skin. They had tied him to the Molloch’s mast, stretching his arms tight around it. Splinters pricked the skin of his bare chest, stabbing at the mark they had burned into him five